Concept Sculpting the Warrior

For the warrior's body I started with a concept sculpt as the base pose, as usual. I then did some retopology using the same method as before, starting with his face before posing the body. However it was only during this stage that I painted a wireframe using Mudbox before retopologizing, a technique that is really helpful for re-building polygons (Fig.04).

Fig.04

Sculpting and Rendering Tests

After the retopology work I transferred the concept details onto a new model and also tweaked and sculpted other parts. Finishing all the sculpting I carried out some rendering tests using mental ray and a Vector Displacement map. I couldn't identify any major problems so declared the sculpting complete (Fig.05).

Fig.05

Painting

I used Mudbox to start painting. It has a lot of paint and layer features, which makes it very easy to paint on your model. It was difficult to use a Displacement map for every tiny detail, which I believe is unnecessary, so I used Bump maps instead. I made Diffuse, Specular, Gloss, Bump and AO maps during this stage (Fig.06).

Fig.06

Rendering and Compositing

The rendering was done via linear workflow and mental ray, with each pass imported into Toxik for the compositing. Toxik supports a node system, so is really easy to build and allow access to your schematic. To create the depth of field (DOF) is just as easy and you can see and adjust the Depth and Blur Range settings.